Cyberpunk 2077 sits at the bottom of my ranking of every single game I’ve completed on the PS4 and on PC, and for a good reason. When I played it on my PlayStation 4 after pre-ordering it, I felt little to no joy at all whatsoever, and it was one of my worst experiences with any form of media due to its incoherent, buggy nature. There were few things that I admired, but there was so much that I loathed. I attempted to get the Platinum trophy, but after a staggering 74 hours, I had learned too late that a few major flaws within the game would come to a stop me from completing my painful objective.
The game was, as I had mentioned, a buggy mess, and as such, the Platinum was rendered unachievable due to some objectives glitching out, including an “Assault-in-progress” for which the objective to claim and finish the job did not appear. The game design as well decided to screw me over, as I realized too late that there was not only a level cap, but once you spend all your attribute points, there was no way to get more, and achievements such as crafting Legendary items became locked out, and I’d have to go back to my last save before progression locked… Which ended up being 20 hours in the past.
It was recently that I attempted to continue on with my quest for the platinum, only to discover that one objective would not spawn, and I could not claim it, rendering it utterly impossible even after multiple attempts to reload an old save file. While that alone still shows off how unpolished the game is months after release, it at least is not as bad in comparison to when it first came out.
The quests and side missions still feel like a slight drag, with too much walking and an unsatisfying ending. Cyberpunk still feels like a game that could have been good if it had been given proper treatment, with a few memorable characters that help bring some amount of joy to the technically horrific title.
In the early days of Cyberpunk, the frame rate was incomprehensibly low, with barely a few seconds of consistent gameplay in hours of playing, and bugs were so prevalent that I had suffered a combined total of over a dozen crashes, which had never happened to me before in any game on my basic PlayStation 4 system.
One thing that has been rather inconsistent both on and after the game’s release was the graphical quality, and while it can look very stunning, the game’s bugs still manage to sneak in low polygon characters that look absolutely terrible in comparison to other details. In one picture I took using the admittedly great Photo Mode Cyberpunk offers, the main subject was wonderful, but it was only later on that I noticed the blocky NPC in the background.
Cyberpunk’s performance has definitely improved, but there are still many bugs and glitches, including some odd textures in different places. Night City still looks visually impressive, but character models and the empty streets still fail to deliver on the promises of CD Projekt Red prior to the game’s release. At least now, the game doesn’t crash every few hours, and the framerate is more stable than it was at launch, despite it still being far too clunky for gunfights to properly play out. Photo Mode is the only way it can reach the heights of the false demo; even then, the game is still clearly lackluster.
Currently, Cyberpunk 2077 still fails to live up to the massive expectations, with Photo Mode at its best barely able to keep up with what was shown in the notoriously false preview of the game. While the game currently runs better than ever, it is still a definitive far cry from what could have been, with its disappointingly empty city. It is definitely more fun, but with its poor performance issues, there is still so much wasted potential for this overly ambitious open-world game that hides the promise of an engaging universe. No matter how many updates it has gotten, the game somehow still hasn’t been salvaged from its broken state.
*All photos are taken on the writer’s PS4 system
